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The bleeps and bloops from vintage video games like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Land and Mega Man are being celebrated this weekend at a new festival. Boston Bitdown is a three-day bash with dozens of digital fusion artists and musicians, including a festival co-founder known as Astro. He creates electronic pop music called chiptune with a handheld Gameboy.
“You can use the four sound channels on the original Gameboy to make songs,” Astro (a.k.a Kris Uzzell) explained, “using the sounds of that nostalgic hardware that we all love from the early ’90s.”
To demonstrate, Astro bounced around an equipment table, like a rave DJ, on stage at Arlington’s Capitol Theatre. “So what you’re hearing now is all Gameboy,” he said of the chirpy, amplified sounds filling the room, „and if I want to throw a couple of effects on there, I can do that. But all I really need is the Gameboy.”
Astro’s green Gameboy, and a small synthesizer/sampler/sequencer called a Dirtywave M8 are plugged into a mixer, along with a powerful effects box. When Astro slides his fingers across the screen it blinks with red, pixelated lights.
“I use the Korg Kaoss Pad because it looks cool, and it’s also probably considered vintage now,” he said, “It just gives me a cool glitch effect.”
The type of glitchy, 8-bit music Astro creates is quintessential chiptune.
“Chiptune comes from the idea that like the original Gameboy had a Casio chip in there that was making these sounds dedicated specifically to the bleeps and the bloops,” he said.
Astro’s BFF and bandmate David Jubinsky — or Biff — jumped in to add, “A lot of people are familiar with the sounds cause it brings them to their childhood. It’s Mario, it’s Mega Man, it’s Kirby. And it brings joy.”
Biff plays more the human instruments — violin and keyboards — in their chiptune trio Battlemode.
“When some people see us for the first time, they ask us afterwards, ‚Oh, are you playing like a video game soundtrack? What are you playing?’” Biff explains how Astro writes the electronic music himself on the Gameboy. When he plays, Astro executes techniques — arpeggios, slides and bends — “just to kind of give it that fun guitar solo sound,” he said.
You can hear how Battlemode incorporates Astro’s Gameboy solo in their electronic pop song, “Just Pretend.”
Astro likens chiptune to being the punk of electronic music. When he was a kid he didn’t have access to traditional instruments, so he learned to make beats on his Gameboy.
“It really empowers you to do more with less, and it’s cool that you can just bring it anywhere. I bring a backpack to most of my shows,” Astro said.
Battlemode’s mission is to share and legitimize chiptune as an art form. But Astro said it can be a tough sell. “We’ve been kicked out of open mics. I’ve been yelled at for playing my music in the subway. And just as a band in general, we’ve always felt almost a little ‘chip’ on our shoulder.”
But chiptune is gaining ground in mainstream music. Battlemode has been invited to perform at Boston Calling this coming May. And starting Thursday the diverse chiptune and digital fusion community will come together in a new festival.
“We’ve got classic chiptune, we’ve got chiptune composers who wrote the music for the movies ‘Marcel the Shell,’ ‘Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,’ and ‘Toxic Avenger,’” Biff said. Other subgenres in the festival include punk, classical and jazz chiptune.
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Biff also added, “I would say 30 percent of our artists are LGBTQ+ artists, which is really important to us right now in this current administration, where people are trying to erase other people.”
Rob Carballo, another Boston Bitdown co-founder, has been active in the scene since 2010. That’s when he started Geekbeatradio, an internet chiptune station and collective dedicated to showcasing local, 8-bit art and music.
“The original intention of Geekbeatradio was to be just anything intellectual that we liked,” he said. “It became heavily focused on chiptune because you have to kind of be a genius to go ahead and use this equipment.”
According to Carballo, the Boston music scene has been nurturing chiptune for 20 years, and these days the college set embraces it.
“The age group no longer sees chiptune music, or video game music as anything other than another type of music,” he said. “We, and all the people who like this stuff, no longer see it as something that’s different. You might be listening to Radiohead one minute and the next minute you’re listening to Battlemode.”
For Carballo, Biff and Astro their indie, DIY chiptune festival’s debut is a dream come true.
“We’re not trying to make money and start Bonnaroo Boston — we just want to have a festival where we can have all our friends come together to make this music and celebrate it at the same time,” Carballo said. “And sure, it would be great if this thing turns into something huge — but I think we’ll be pretty satisfied if we can just do it right once.”
Their ambitious convergence takes place across five venues in Somerville and Arlington: the Crystal Ballroom, the Jungle, Warehouse XI, the Rockwell and the Capitol Theatre.
“We’re probably all losing money,” Astro said with a laugh about their DIY festival, “but it’s just so much fun, it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s super nerdy.”
Boston Bitdown runs March 6-8 in Somerville and Arlington. See the full lineup here.
This segment aired on March 5, 2025.
Andrea Shea is a correspondent for WBUR's arts & culture reporter.
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Boston Bitdown fest celebrates music from vintage video games – WBUR
